Alabama

YOUR VIEW: Newspaper changes mean loss of local leaders in Alabama

I'm sure the Newhouse family members in New Jersey and New York knew best when they decided to publish their three daily newspapers here in Alabama three days a week and make their statewide website, al.com, the centerpiece of news operations here.

But why such a dramatic change now? Wall Street doesn't care. The Newhouses own the papers outright.

We're losing local leaders in Mobile, Huntsville and Birmingham -- three cities with little in common. One common news website? Who feels an attachment to al.com?

But it's as if we're a colony. The family has sucked hundreds of millions of dollars in profits from Alabama. Wags used to call one of the papers, the Mobile Press-Register, the Cash-Register. Perhaps the Newhouse family needed the money to back up their upmarket magazines, such as The New Yorker.

The danger to the Newhouses, I suggest, might come in the form of new local publications that spring up. We'll see.

Meanwhile, we readers will know that some management consultant, probably with a Harvard MBA, convinced somebody in New Jersey and New York they knew how to run the newspapers here in Alabama -- run them into the ground.